


The Eyes Have It

by Jondera



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: Gen, Rebuilding the Uchiha Clan, Silver Queen's Dreaming of Sunshine Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 17:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18878023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jondera/pseuds/Jondera
Summary: Accidents happen, and sometimes they have far-reaching consequences.





	The Eyes Have It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MathIsMagic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathIsMagic/gifts).



Hayami stared at the doctor in shock. “Pregnant? But I’ve been taking the medicine…”

The doctor sighed. “You know perfectly well the medicine isn’t perfect. If you had chakra training, I could teach you the techniques, but…”

Hayami scowled. Just what she didn’t need while figuring out what to do about this particular disruption to her career - a reminder that she’s a civilian in a village full of shinobi. 

The doctor, at least, seemed to be able to read her mood and coughed. “Anyway. Yes, you’re pregnant. I’d say about 8 weeks. Do you know who the father is?”

Hayami gave the man a flat stare. 8 weeks ago was the week of the spring festival, one of the most lucrative weeks of the year for someone in her profession. “I couldn’t even narrow it down to a list of twenty.” She gives herself a shake. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Can you perform an abortion, or recommend me someone else to talk to?”

The doctor frowned, and sighed. “No, I can’t. By order of Councilman Shimura, until the village population has recovered from the third war and the… destruction the night the Fourth died, all abortions are illegal, except in cases of medical emergency.”

Hayami stared at the man in shock. It had been 3 ½ years since the demon fox had ravaged the village, and they were still implementing laws because of it? They were going to force her to have this baby? “But… I don’t have enough money saved up, I can’t be out of work that long.”

The doctor grunted and said “Well, that, at least, I can help with.” He stood up and walked over to a cabinet in the corner of his office, rifling through it and pulling out a sheet of paper. It looked like some kind of official form, though Hayami couldn’t tell any details. “So, the Hokage had this program set up. Single mothers who need financial help with their children can apply to the tower for aid; a living stipend for her during pregnancy and for 6 months afterwards, then child support payments afterwards for as long as the child is their dependent. The only requirement is that the child enters the academy at age 8 and trains as a shinobi. See, here’s the monthly amounts…”

Hayami’s eyes land on the numbers indicated and her breath catches. She could make more than that, but it was a respectable sum, and the lower child support payments would help her finances a lot, even with the added expenses of taking care of a child. And as far as the requirement of going to the academy to become a shinobi went, that was another benefit, as far as she was concerned. Shinobi had money, they had power and status. They never had to worry about where their next meal was going to come from or whether they would be able to afford their next month’s rent. Shinobi comprised the bulk of her clientele. If her child was a shinobi, then she would be able to retire to something other than begging for scraps when her body stopped cooperating with her current career. She turned her gaze back to the doctor. “Show me where to sign."

\----------------------------------------

Akari settled into her seat in the academy classroom after lunch, reviewing the classwork from the morning before Iruka sensei came back to start the afternoon session. Glancing around the room, she saw Yumi chatting with her friends while the boys did what they usually did. Hanabi and Chiyako both sat quietly in their own little bubbles; similar to and yet markedly different from Akari’s own; Hanabi was left alone because she had made it clear that she wanted to be left alone, and the combination of her position as a member of the Hyuuga main family and the fact that she could (and regularly did) beat everyone else in the class at taijutsu spars even without using Jyuuken meant nobody pushed the matter. Chiyako was left alone because, as an Aburame, everyone else in the class found her off-putting… the year before she’d tried making friends and Akari had heard something about a sleepover, but after that Chiyako had started ignoring Yumi and the other girls.

Akari herself was left alone because everyone else in the class, even the other civilian girls, thought that she was beneath them. No matter that Hanabi was the only one in the class who could routinely beat her academic marks, or that none of the other civilian girls put in even half the effort that she did in taijutsu and chakra control. Everyone knew her mother was a prostitute, and that the village paid to help support her. The Kunoichi class teachers were twice as strict with her as they were with any of the other girls, because everyone expected her to get shuffled off into the genin corps and spend her career on seduction missions; like mother, like daughter. They remarked on her fair skin and silky black hair, the classical beauty she would undoubtedly grow into, and how it would serve her well in that role.

Akari knew what that life was like; she had grown up in the small apartment on a back street of the slums that her mother had been able to afford, doing her business out of a nearby hotel. Sure, as a kunoichi, she’d be much better paid, but she wanted better than that. So what if she was civilian born? She didn’t need to have a clan to succeed as a shinobi. She’d study hard and get them to train her for something. Maybe a hospital internship… Anything that would let her and her mother have a better life.

Iruka-sensei entered the classroom and banged on his desk to bring the class to attention. He called out the matches for the afternoon taijutsu spars, and Akari sighed; she’d been matched with Hanabi again. It was less uncommon than she would have liked; the effort she put into her training meant that she was a poor match for most of the other civilian students. 

She had a bit of time to prepare, so she pulled out the notes she’d been making about chakra enhancement, looking over the theory and thinking about it… the biggest problem she had sparring with Hanabi wasn’t her reflexes - she was fast - but Hanbi was subtle; even without the chakra strikes, Jyuuken stances flowed so smoothly that it was hard to predict a strike or see where the next attack was coming from. She knew how chakra enhancement helped strengthen muscles and bones, making them faster and stronger and more durable than they would be without it. She knew how it worked. She wanted to apply the same principle to her senses, to see if she couldn’t get that little bit of an edge on seeing Hanabi coming so she could start her blocks on time.

She knew she wouldn’t have much time to start the process once the spar began, so she ignored the first several matches in favor of focusing her chakra and working on moving it toward her eyes. From her previous chakra control exercises, she didn’t expect it to work this time, or even the next five times, but if she kept practicing, then eventually…

Surprisingly, it was easier than expected, almost as though channeling chakra to her eyes was what she was supposed to have been doing all along. Feeling pleased by that small success, she stepped down to the sparring ring when Iruka called out her name, and faced Hanabi across the mat, making the formal seal of confrontation before settling into her academy basic stance and sending a thread of chakra into her eyes to hopefully catch Hanabi’s first attack before it started.

When the attack came, the results were not what she was expecting. Hanabi took her stance and slid forward, a palm darting out, and as the strike flew forward, something inside Akari’s head seemed to click, and the blow which had been blindingly fast now seemed to float through the air, even as Akari ducked to the side and pushed the blow wide. Hanabi twitched in surprise at the reaction, but recovered immediately, spinning in place and launching a pair of strikes towards Akari.

Akari marveled at the other girl’s attacks; where before, Jyuken had simply been synonymous with pain, now she could pick it apart, understand the stance and the foot movements and how the strikes were formed. Dropping back and accepting one of the blows on her side to parry the other, she took a gamble and shifted her stance, bringing her own hands forward in a mirror of the strikes that she had just defended against.

Hanabi’s obvious shock at having someone strike back at her with even a copied Jyuken stance slowed her reactions enough that she was pushed back, but she didn’t rejoin the match with her usual speed; she opened the distance and stood in a clearly defensive stance, her white eyes flicking back and forth between Akari - breathing somewhat heavily and surprised by her own success - and Iruka, who was just as completely shocked as everyone else in the room at what he had just witnessed. With a moment to process, he called for a halt to the match and Akari joined Hanabi in forming the seal of reconciliation while Iruka turned the rest of the class over to another teacher and asked Akari to follow him to the teacher’s office.

Once there, he sat her down in a chair and quickly wrote out two messages which he directed a nearby pair of genin to take; one directly to the Hokage’s office, the other to Akari’s mother. By the time he turned his attention back to Akari, her heart was in her throat with nerves; had she done something wrong? Was she going to be in trouble?

Iruka sat down opposite her and, after a long moment, said “All right Akari, you’re not in trouble, but this is very unexpected and there’s going to be a lot of people very interested in you. I know you were raised by your mother, but did she ever say anything about who your father was?”

Akari frowned. “No. I don’t think she even knows; you know what she does.” She wasn’t ashamed of her mother, even if everyone else seemed to be. But that didn’t mean she liked thinking about it.

Iruka sighed. “I suspected that. At least there’s procedures in place…” he trailed off, then stood up and crossed to a supply cabinet, bringing out a small hand mirror. Carrying it over to her, he says “Here, it’s probably easier to show you.”

Akari took the mirror and turned it towards her face, confused at what he meant, until she met her own gaze, and froze. Instead of the brown eyes that had looked back from her mirror as long as she could remember, she met red eyes, each with a single black tomoe spinning lazily around it. She knew what that was, even if she had never seen one before; everyone knew that description. The Sharingan. She had the Sharingan.

\----------------------------------------

It takes less than 20 minutes for the first recipients of Iruka-sensei’s messages to arrive. Akari had, by then, calmed down enough that she had been able to focus on her chakra to figure out how to stop the flow to her eyes and watched them bleed back to neutral brown; everything seemed… out of focus. Duller. Without the Sharingan.

She was trying to sort her thoughts on what that meant when the door to the office banged open and a woman strode in, long blonde hair streaming behind her green haori; it only took Akari a moment to recognize Tsunade-sama, the Hokage. This was important enough for the Hokage to come running?

Following Tsunade through the door was a slouched man with dark hair pulled back up at the back of his head and several scars across his face; she didn’t recognize him, but he wore the uniform of a Jonin and when he noticed her watching him he gave her a small smile before turning his attention back to the Hokage, who was already at Iruka’s desk.

The Hokage’s questions were forestalled by Iruka simply handing her a file. Her file, Akari realized, which Tsunade-sama took with a half-glare and threw herself into an empty chair to read. Once she was done, she passed the entire file to the slouched man, who was leaning against the wall to her left. As he started reading, there was a knock at the door, which then opened.

The new arrival was a teenage boy; Akari got an impression of very messy black hair and a Jonin uniform that looked like it had been pulled on in a hurry; she frowned to herself, because he couldn’t be more than… maybe 15 years old, and most people didn’t make Jonin… ah, of course, she’d heard that Uchiha Sasuke and his teammate had been promoted recently. The youngest Jonin in the village since Sasuke’s older brother.

Presumably-Sasuke glanced at her with a faintly confused expression, then crossed the room to the Hokage who just waved him to an empty chair while the slouched man continued reading her file, taking considerably longer at it than Tsunade-sama had.

The wait was getting rather uncomfortable; Sasuke was obviously very curious about what was going on but restraining himself, the older man had finished her file and set it back on Iruka-sensei’s desk before closing his eyes to apparently sit and think, Tsunade-sama was glaring indiscriminately around the room; rather pointedly not glaring at Akari, though she did catch an occasional glance. Sensei appeared to be trying to keep himself busy and out of the way with paperwork for the moment.

After another five minutes or so of awkward silence, there was another knock on the door and the tension broke as one of the genin serving as a teaching assistant for the day showed Akari’s mother into the room. Hayami looked around, clearly not entirely sure who everyone in the room was, but didn’t hesitate to come and sit down next to Akari and pull her into a quick hug.

Tsunade-sama cleared her throat. “All right, now that everyone is here, let’s get to business. Iruka?”

Sensei nodded, and said “Right. First of all, introductions; Hokage-sama, this is Hayami-san and her daughter, Akari. Hayami, this is Tsunade-sama, the Hokage, Nara Shikaku, the Jonin commander, and Uchiha Sasuke, the Uchiha clan head.” He glanced back and forth as all the adults acknowledged each other, Hayami looking a little bewildered at the caliber of people she was meeting. “I asked you all here because earlier this afternoon, during a sparring session in class, Akari-chan developed what I believe to be the Sharingan.”

Tsunade-sama didn’t look surprised by the announcement. The older man - Shikaku-sama - simply nodded to himself as though it was simply confirmation of something he had already known. Hayami stiffened in surprise, and Uchiha Sasuke looked completely stunned at the announcement.

It was Shikaku that broke the moment of silence. “She doesn’t appear to have the Sharingan active at the moment.” He glanced at her. “Well, Akari-chan? Could you…” She nodded, closing her eyes for a moment while she focused on her chakra, directing it back into her eyes again, and reopened them to find that the room had regained that extra layer of sharpness and clarity, letting her pick out dozens of details at a glance. Everyone in the room stared at her face.

Tsunade snorted. “Right. That’s the Sharingan.” She glanced at Iruka “Usually awakening the Sharingan requires some… fairly specific circumstances. How did it happen during a class sparring session?”

Iruka shrugged. “I don’t actually know. Hanabi-chan is aggressive, but she and Akari spar a couple times a week. Today didn’t appear to be anything unusual, at least, not until…”

Akari cleared her throat nervously. “I. Uh. I think I may have done it by accident? I had been studying how chakra enhancement worked and wanted to try it with my eyes so I could follow Hanabi better in our match. I didn’t think it would work, but it seemed so easy, and then…”

Tsunade grunted, while Shikaku looked thoughtful. Hayami looked confused.

Tsunade picked up the discussion again. “Right. I’ll have to look into that. Anyway, there are going to be some repercussions from this. Shikaku?”

Shikaku nodded absently. “Yes. Let’s leave aside the political issues for the moment; those are more our end of things anyway. Village law is clear on this situation, though; when a civilian develops a bloodline ability unique to a clan, that clan has the right to adopt the civilian into their ranks. Given the current state of the Uchiha clan, there are going to be a lot of people pushing for that…” He glanced at Sasuke. “Sasuke?”

Sasuke pulled his eyes from Akari’s face, and visibly gathered himself. “Yes. Adoption.” He looked at Hayami’s expression and swallowed. “I… would like to. But I don’t want to force you to…” he trailed off, apparently unsure.

Hayami cut in. “What exactly is involved in the adoption?”

Shikaku answered. “Generally, the person will take the clan name, and be required to follow the clan laws and answer to the clan head and elders, though in this case…” He glanced at Sasuke. Everyone took his meaning; the Uchiha clan had no elders. “In return, the clan becomes responsible for their welfare; providing housing and living expenses and equipment and extra training.”

Hayami frowned, tightening her grip on Akari’s shoulder. “Are you asking me to give up my daughter?”

Shikaku winced, and turned to Sasuke. The teen looked aghast at the suggestion. “Of course not, just…” He shot Shikaku a pleading glance. The older man picked things up again.

“There is always room in each particular case for… adjustments. In this situation, especially with the lack of other clan members, I would recommend filing the adoption paperwork for both of you; the Uchiha district has plenty of houses available and while I haven’t personally checked, I’m sure they have the funding to spare to support you both. I understand from Akari’s file that her father is unknown, but he clearly had Uchiha blood. We will probably also need to file the papers to have Akari-chan confirmed as the clan heir.”

Akari squeaked. “Me, clan heir?”

Shikaku sighed. “Yes, under the circumstances. Other considerations become rather moot point when there’s only two known Uchiha in the village.” He glanced at Hayami. “There will be some other things. If the adoption goes through, you will have to… change vocations. Shinobi are generally quite accepting of certain careers, but yours is one that is generally not associated with major clans, especially noble ones. There will be a lot of eyes on you; they will mostly look the other way for things that happened before the adoption, but after…”

Hayami looked unsettled. “I. You’re saying that the Uchiha clan will just. Pay to support me and Akari, and pay for all her equipment and supplies, and give us a house. Just because of her eyes?”

Shikaku nodded. “Yes. Bloodlines are valuable, and the Sharingan is a powerful, and rare, ability. Especially rare since…” He cut himself off. No need to go into details.

Akari glanced at Sasuke, and saw that he was staring at her again; but now the surprise on his face had been replaced by hope, and something that she’d seen on the faces of some of her classmates’ families. With a jolt, she realized what had gone unspoken; the Uchiha clan had been killed, except for Sasuke. His entire family was dead, except his brother who was a traitor. She didn’t think he even knew for himself how much he wanted a family again. She tugged on Hayami’s arm, and her mother broke off her conversation with Shikaku to look down at her.

“Mama, I. I want to.” She glanced back at Sasuke, and offered him a shy smile. It would be nice to have more family.


End file.
